FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 				CONTACT:
November 1, 1995				   Michael Schneider
						   Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
						   (412)268-5869

The T3E will be faster and have more memory than the T3D, said Ralph Roskies and Michael Levine, PSC scientific directors, who expect that performance on applications running at PSC will improve three to four times. This will benefit the scientific community nationwide, they said, by providing a powerful new tool that will make a difference on important problems, including turbulence, cosmology, drug design, weather forecasting and global climate change.

Critical to exploiting the potential of scalable, parallel processing, which teams tens to thousands of processors to work simultaneously on one computing job, is the development of applications software. PSC is one of the leading research centers worldwide addressing this need, and the new system will allow the center to build on its successful work with the T3D. Since August 1993, when the first T3D arrived at Pittsburgh, Cray and PSC joined forces in a concerted effort that has made a number of important applications available on the new architecture -- in quantum chemistry, materials science, protein sequence-analysis and other areas.

With the T3E, PSC will extend this work, which has facilitated a new level of scientific productivity with scalable, parallel processing, as exemplified by recent results on Pittsburgh's T3D:

• During the 1995 spring storm season in Oklahoma, a computer model successfully predicted the location and structure of individual thunderstorms six hours in advance, the first time anywhere this has been accomplished. Current weather forecasting gives only about thirty minutes warning for severe storms.

• A high-resolution simulation of circulation in the Atlantic Ocean showed unprecedented ability to accurately predict the course of the Gulf Stream. This is a notable advance for ocean modeling that will help scientists and policymakers to reliably assess the consequences of rising ocean levels related to global climate change.

• Researchers conducted what is believed to be the largest simulation of turbulence ever, and the resulting visualizations of the outer region of the Sun revealed features that theorists had predicted but that cannot be observed. This affects our ability to predict the Sun's lifetime and helps to improve understanding of solar flares, intense energy bursts from the Sun that can disrupt electronic systems on Earth.

• A simulation of the primary visual cortex successfully replicated experimental results showing "self-organization" of neuron-to-neuron connections. Along with advancing understanding of human perception and cognition, this research is also a step toward real world implementation of artificial vision, for which potential applications -- face recognition, for example, in home security systems -- are virtually unlimited.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, a joint project of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with Westinghouse Electric Corporation, was established in 1986 by a grant from the National Science Foundation with support from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Its purpose is to develop and make available state-of-the-art high-performance computing for scientific researchers nationwide.

PSC news release, installation of the CRAY T3D.

PSC news release, arrival of the new Cray T3E.

go back to contents page